


Life On Hold

by DreamLogic



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 12:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1031750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamLogic/pseuds/DreamLogic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite her illness, following Kira’s disappearance Cosima is more worried about Sarah’s well-being than anything else.  Post series completely introspective Cosima-centric one-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life On Hold

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short piece, kinda unrequited Cosima-ish, don’t really know where this came from, just really love this show and wanted to contribute something to this fandom. Hope the characterisation isn’t too off but I apologise if it is. Written really quickly and barely edited so let me know if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense.

She tries to hide it from Sarah at first, her illness. It’s hard considering that they’re all basically confined to Felix’s loft, but with Kira going missing she figures that there are more important things to be worrying about at the moment. Or at least things that require more immediate attention anyway. It’s not like she’s not doing anything to help herself, she’s working on it, Delphine’s working on it, they’re trying as hard as they can under the circumstances to find out how to cure whatever it is that’s wrong with her, and sure, she knows that she should probably be more worried about herself but she just can’t stop thinking about Sarah.

Day in, day out Cosima watches her tear herself apart, and she tries, my god does she try, to hold her together, to pick up the pieces and put them together again because it’s clear that Sarah can’t do it herself at the moment, she’s too focused on Kira to have any sense of her own well-being. And anyway, Cosima muses, she has Delphine to worry about her, to hold her together, who does Sarah have? Well, Felix of course but for some reason she doesn’t even attempt to identify, she doesn’t want him to be the one that Sarah turns to. No matter how happy she is that Sarah has someone who obviously loves her so much she wants to be her person. That’s the only way she can describe the pull she feels towards her genetic identical. Wanting to be her person. Because this thing that she feels pushes the boundaries of any definition that she can think of that should be applied to their relationship. In the realm between friendship, family and something _more_ , something different. Something that she doesn’t let herself consciously consider but chases her in her dreams, teasing her with its improbable possibilities.

She finds herself waking in the night to the sound of Sarah’s muffled whimpers from across the room and her heart breaks for her. She doesn’t know what else to do so she does the only thing that she can right now to make it better, she holds her tight, whispers what she hopes are soothing words to her slumbering form and wills all of the Sarah’s hurt and trouble away for a little while. It’s futile but she doesn’t know what else to do. She so often exists purely in the realm of science, of fact, for the longest time she immersed herself in it and little else and emotions so often deny reason that she doesn’t know what to do with them, doesn’t know how to read them, the beginning of her relationship with Delphine a prime example. Social cues of any kind have never really been her thing but she really hopes that this is what Sarah needs because, she kind of needs it too. More than she’s ever needed anything like this before.

 She’s so scared of everything. It’s all falling apart around her and she’s clutching at straws trying to keep things together, trying to make the world just slow down and she doesn’t know how to make any of it stop.  So she holds Sarah closer, holds her tighter, too close for just too long each time. Closer than she knows she should. Closer than she lets Delphine, both figuratively and more and more frequently literally as well.

Trust, she muses, is fragile. How can she ever hope to trust Delphine again when she’s lied to her before, betrayed her. How can she love her when she can’t let her be the person she relies on, at least not without doubting her sincerity? It’s like that one choice has negated anything that’s happened since and realistically she knows that Delphine chose _her_ over everything else, she left her life and followed her into uncertainty but she can’t feel it the way that she knows that she should. Being the one that someone chooses over everything else is the dream, right? That’s the fairytale. Delphine choosing her, being interested in her as more than her job is literally al she wanted but now that she has it she isn’t sure what to do with it. She loves her, or at least she thinks she does, but she can’t feel it the way she used to. She’s sure that Delphine must be able that something has changed, how could she not? They barely talk about anything that’s not her fucked up genetics anymore, not anything meaningful anyway. She’s surprised that the other scientist hasn’t given up on her completely already when she can feel all that they ever were slowly slipping through her fingers. She thinks that she may have when Delphine actually leaves.

She says that she can help her more with the resources that the DYAD Institute can offer her and Cosima’s inclined to agree, even if it means losing the person who is essentially her safety blanket, her rock. Working out of Felix’s flat hardly affords them the space to work and that’s before they even consider their complete lack of equipment of any sort and their relationship has been less than perfect for far too long now for her departure to come as a surprise. Cosima can hardly bring herself to care, although, it was nice to have the woman there the distance between them is too great, and she is too wrapped up in trying to fix everything else, too wrapped up in Sarah and herself to even really notice her absence.  

Of course she can’t hide it forever. Before she left, Delphine told her that she couldn’t keep avoiding her problems, even if she didn’t want to directly address her illness, even if she just treated it as a scientific project, that it would eventually catch up with her. So no she couldn’t hide it forever, not with the intimacy that somehow developed between the two of them despite Sarah’s initial resistance. Especially since Delphine’s departure and she has no one else to rely on, try as she may to conceal it, even through the mask of her grief and the single minded determination that surrounds her in search for her daughter, Sarah can tell that something is wrong. One too long trip to the bathroom too many, one misplaced bloody tissue left in plain sight, and as Sarah tells her, she’s worried about her daughter not a bloody idiot.

Even still she tries to down-play it. To make it seem less serious than she knows that it is. Sarah doesn’t need anything else to be worried about at the moment.  Even with Delphine’s aid she’s getting worse quickly, too quickly for them to have any idea what to do and she doesn’t have the other scientist there to help her to hide it anymore, to help stave off Sarah’s suspicion or worry. She doesn’t know how much longer she can keep it from Sarah’s attention or even how long before the illness consumes her.

So she just holds Sarah closer and wills both of their pain away, relishing those scarce moments where she can pretend that nothing is wrong. It’s so easy to forget everything when she has her in her arms. But the moments can never last, for they were never supposed to be hers, and she accepts the fact that Sarah’s never really going to want her in the ways she barely admits to herself that she wants the other woman. For now though, it’s enough. It’s enough to hold her in her sleep and pretend that everything’s okay because if she stops to think about even the possibility of more, or of the future in any kind of way she’s not sure she could hold it together anymore. Because they have a whole lot of shit to worry about, to be scared of, so why not put it off just for one more night?

She figures, If she’s gonna die, if there’s nothing she can do about this thing that’s happening to her,  she can let herself have that, can’t she?


End file.
